"After my husband died I needed help but didn't know how to ask. A funeral is many things, including that giant to-do list, but repairing a shattered life is pretty much only one thing: hard work. The paradox is that no one else can do it for you, yet you can’t do it alone."

Poet Priscilla Long asks: What does art do for the grieving person, the survivor? Art beholds the beloved, remembers the beloved, makes the beloved visible. And art laments. Art keens. Art puts the private agony of grief out into the world where it reverberates with an elemental core of our human condition.

There's just never enough time to get everything on your to-do list done, let alone cut down on clutter and get organized. But what if you could actually squeeze more minutes into your day? Here's how stop wasting time, and organize your home and your life in manageable five minute increments.

“It’s not money that’s the problem, but the meaning we give to it,” says Dave Wann, an expert on sustainable living. “With the downturn in the economy, more people are examining a new paradigm for looking at wealth, and defining it in terms of their values instead of just money and the stuff that it buys.” But how do we decide how much money really is enough?

"I know there are people who have always known their destinations. When I worry that I’m getting nowhere, I try to remember the power of never attaining. What would it mean to want for nothing? I can only think that to stop wanting would snuff out the candle of the glittering next life."

Cooking has always been celebrity chef Jesse Schenker's first passion and true "addiction." After getting out of jail, he flipped the switch and put the same tenacity and passion that he had for drugs into his cooking. Here are some of his other healthy habits he's become addicted to.

"The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be. It is the pauses in a piece of music that gives the piece its beauty and its shape; always keep pushing forward at full speed, and you end up out of breath."

It doesn’t matter if you bake muffins or write poems, or if you give birth to a child or instead choose to dote on and nurture a furry, four-legged babe. When you do one thing you love, you show your gratitude for being alive. (Contributed by Melissa Studdard)

Are you still hanging onto those skinny jeans that haven’t zipped since two kids ago, or a grudge against a co-worker who snitched on you that’s long past its expiration date? Let’s face it, we all have stuff from our past that could be tossed to the curb to make room for bigger and better things.

"I couldn’t put love in the garbage. Wasn’t that the worst kind of karma—to put any manifestation of love in a blue plastic box with soda cans and junk mail, to be tossed out in the alley—even if that love no longer existed? Which raised the question: didn’t love, once it had existed, still exist in the universe?"

"At the beginning, I was truly the worst student in every dance class. One dance teacher had to stifle a giggle in her sleeve after seeing my legs tangle themselves up. But I still loved it and I wanted it: I dreamed of finding grace – of becoming fierce, strong, in control of my body. And so I persevered."